For too long we’ve ignored the wild intelligence of our bodies, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. Abram’s writing subverts this distance, drawing readers ever closer to their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the human body and the breathing Earth.

As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we’ve ignored the wild intelligence of our bodies, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. Abram’s writing subverts this distance, drawing readers ever closer to their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the human body and the breathing Earth. The shape-shifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in this book.

“David Abram's new book is so invigorating, its teachings leap off the page and translate immediately into lived experience. Shaking us free from the prisons of our mental constructions. Becoming Animal brings us home to ourselves as living organs of this wild planet.” — Joanna Macy

“As with many deeply original—and radical—books, this work may startle, even provoke the reader in its electric reversal of conventional thought. Worth any provocation for the profundity of its insights, this is a portrait of the artist as a young raven, arguing, with all the subtlety of his mind, for the mindedness of the body. An exercise of uncanny imagination by a writer who has a sixth sense for the intelligence of the first five." — Jay Griffiths

“If we are to survive—indeed, if we are to stop the dominant culture from killing the planet—it will be in great measure because of brave and brilliant beings like David Abram. This is a beautifully written, deeply moving, and important book.' — Derrick Jensen

“This startling, sparkling book challenges the technological temper of our times by returning us to the animal body in ourselves. Abram shows brilliantly how this body brings us back to Earth in a series of acutely moving descriptions of its polysensory genius. An original work of primary philosophy, it is written with verve, passion, and poetry," — Edward S. Casey,

Contents:
Note to the Reader
Introduction: Between the Body and the Breathing Earth
Shadow (Depth Ecology I)
House (Materiality I)
Wood and Stone (Materiality II)
Reciprocity (Knowledge I: Science and Experience)
Depth (Depth Ecology II)
Mind (Knowledge II: The Ecology of Consciousness)
Mood (Depth Ecology III)
The Speech of Things (Language I)
The Discourse of the Birds (Language II)
Sleight-of-Hand (Magic I)
Shapeshifting (Magic II)
The Real in Its Wonder (Language III)
Conclusion: At the Heart of the Heart of the World

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